Bronx is Up, WTC is down: paraphrasing Leonard Bernstein. A public service guerilla action for Architecture League’s Make a Difference in Two Days

By Austin+Mergold With James Bowman and Denise Ramzy and Sally Reynolds

In
November 2008 The New York Architecture League announced a 48-hour design
activism challenge – calling designers to start actively shaping public space
in NYC. The ‘New York community’, the public, populus, the “New Yokaz”, the
very individuals who use the public space, is a large yet ephemeral entity. Where
can this community be observed on a daily basis and on a short notice? The New
York City subway system -- or precisely the moment where the subway ends and
city begins – the subway station entrance, is where millions of New Yorkers can
be seen daily emerging from below ground in nearly 500 stations. Re-emerging
into the city through a subway station is transformative – it is a link between
an abstraction of subway lines and real urban geography, a kind of a daily rite
of passage, the ultimate public space. And as we found, it is often confusing
even for a “seasoned” New Yorker, much less for a visitor, because the standard
NYC subway entrance fails to re-orient the traveler back to the City.

We
began considering the language of way-finding appropriate to the boundary
between subway and the city. Other cities often introduce a north arrow, either
embedded in the pavement, or attached as a sign. In NYC, however, both local residents
and tourists rely on the idea of “up” and “down” to orient themselves within
the city, and use iconic landmarks serve as primary way-finding devices. "New
York, New York, a helluva town. The Bronx is up but the Battery's down" –
in his 1944 New York, New York
Leonard Bernstein captured the essence of local vernacular way-finding – the
landmarks are equated with cardinal directions. Yet there was a missing piece. For
thirty years, until 2001, several generations of New Yorkers consider the Twin
Towers of the World Trade Center as ‘down’. Since then, there has been no
substitute yet. The clunky Freedom Tower, finally topped off in 2013, has yet
be domesticated into the New York way-finding vernacular (if it ever will be),
and a generation has grown up without a familiar double stub of the World Trade
to reliably point out the downtown upon the brief confusion in the first
seconds on the city ground post-subway-ride.

Furthermore,
the destruction of the WTC was that kind of an event that made New York a
community – the type of transcendental occurrence, politics and other consequences
aside, that brought many ethnicities, classes, generations together, at its
best as a simple notion of allegiance and belonging, without any undercurrents
of pathos, ideology, hubris or hatred. In itself, autumn of 2001 was a somber
but beautiful time in New York – saddened by the tragedy, but emboldened by the
palpable emergence of the spirit of the City. That was worth remembering!

48
hours later, a visual reminder for the missing downtown landmark of the WTC
towers went up on and around 23rd St N, R station one night in
November of 2008. Directional signs pointing toward Ground Zero served both as
a functional way-finding device and as a distributed memorial to the spirit of
New York City. Lost in the cacophony of NYC street signage, we imagined these
devices deployed throughout the city, infiltrating the infrastructure of information.
The two prototypes lasted nearly two months before NYC DOT and MTA finally took
them down.